Does your language control you? Further reading and viewing! : Some People Juggle Geese

Below are some links relating to topics covered in my Funzing Singapore Talk, Does Your Language Control You?

**Articles about Through the Language Glass:Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher (2010):**

A more personal, less academic take on the subject, which is nevertheless full of interesting technical insight:

Love in Translation: Learning about culture, communication, and intimacy in my husband’s native French by Lauren Collins (New Yorker)

You are performing a feat of interpretation anytime you attempt to communicate with someone who is not like you.

Linguists have attempted to make an objective assessment of the relative difficulty of languages by breaking them down into parts. One factor is the level of inflection, or the amount of information that a language carries on a single word. The languages of large, literate societies usually have larger vocabularies. You might think that their structures are also more elaborate, but the opposite is generally true: the simpler the society, the more baroque its morphology…. Because large societies have frequent interaction with outsiders, their languages undergo simplification. Members of relatively homogeneous groups, on the other hand, share a base of common knowledge, enabling them to pile on declensions without confusing one another. Small languages stay spiky. But, amid waves of contact, large languages lose their sharp edges, becoming bevelled as pieces of glass.